Good Old Boys, Bad New Weather

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Yuba City, California residents watch as a tornado touches down outside of town, 1 June 2011: photo by Angie Owens/CBS Sacramento

A severe thunderstorm cell heralded the air of a new kind of June as it moved across Yolo County, blasting the unrepentant land with marble-sized hail and triggering multiple funnel cloud sightings, seeming weirdly out of control as it spun across the naked unprotected fields and highways, accumulating fresh energy from sources none could comprehend as it picked up velocity and force, gained strength over Natomas and showed its surprising and unprecedented power to the residents of the state capitol by peppering the outskirts of their trepidated city with pellets of hail larger than an inch in diameter, the power and anger of the storm now apparent... You see, there's this thing going on. A cooling of the North Pacific Ocean called the Pacific decadal oscillation. Plenty of computers, plenty of geeks working on the long range modeling, but nobody was planning on that. Not now. Nor, at this time of year, like, ever.

Funnel cloud appears outside town as storm approaches, northern California, 1 June 2011: photo by Brian Palmer/CBS Sacramento

Hail falls in Roseville, California near Garbolino Park, 1 June 2011: photo by Debbie Camillio/CBS Sacramento

Inexorable the word that then came to mind in the truck stop thought balloon imagination of the new time in which all are now uncertainly living, the question mark rising up into the mesospheric areas of mystery, where as the earth warms blue electric ice and noctilucent cloudshapes form, feeding upon methane gases released by the infinitely tiny culpable ones far down below, to stream across the night sky, illuminating the dazzling darkness with ethereal ribbon-like magnets attracting metal and water vapour, frozen necklaces turning thence into twisted filigreed structures, leaving their wispy crystalline trails of supernatural diaphanous beauty to cloak the summer nights of the extreme latitudes with an eerily brilliant shimmering, the unstill silver banners and signals of things to come. So pretty these fine glittering metallic strands of pseudo-clouds, in someone else's manmade summertime.

Noctilucent clouds, UK (panoramic view): photo by Nick Bramhall, 28 June 2007

And so...

Bystanders snap photos of a funnel cloud northeast of Yuba City, California, 1 June 2011: photo by Jenny Keen/CBS Sacramento)

Funnel cloud sightings persisted throughout the afternoon, but a touchdown wasn’t confirmed until a new storm cell came on as if out of nowhere, and of a sudden gained strength over Yuba County, dropping a twister into a rural area a few miles north of Yuba City

Said the oracle...

A funnel cloud appears near Live Oaks, California, 1 June 2011: photo by Brian Palmer/CBS Sacramento

Dozens of lightning strikes split open trees, and Jeez. This is freaking awesome. Let's like grab our boards and go up on the roof, yo.

Two Roseville residents greet the first day of June with open arms: viewer photo/CBS Sacramento

High winds could make traffic dangerous across the icy Sierra roadways throughout the night. Steel yourself for a long night on the road, boys. Drivers are urged to use caution. Chains advised on some passes.

Coffee and the whites of your eyes, to see you through the mouth of the area of unexpected and totally unpredictable zones of atmospheric instability.

Y'all understand, this one, she could be some kind of storm.

Artificial noctilucent cloud created by launch of Phoenix Mars Mission Delta II rocket, 4 August 2007: photo by Andrew Annex